Sexual education is being implemented in schools across Canada, the US, UK, New Zeeland and Australia. At one point it will become a global reality: children as young as 5 years old will all be introduced to “the pleasures of sex.” If that sounds strange, it’s because that is strange.

What those new sex curricula do is encourage children and teens to have sex without telling the whole story. They raise kids’ curiosity and awareness to sexual possibilities but leave out important facts concerning physical and psychological health.

That’s really disturbing. Even more disturbing are certain people behind the curricula. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Many communities of outraged parents are protesting the sex ed curricula. Brushed off, they’re accused of ignorance. To sort out once and for all this matter, a group of concerned parents in Canada asked Dr. Miriam Grossman to revise the Toronto sex ed curriculum. Grossman is a renowned child and adolescence psychiatrist with many years of work at the UCLA campus, and what she finds in the curriculum doesn’t sound good: health here is not the priority.

“The priority,” Grossman tells the parents, “is to mold your child’s thinking and attitudes so that they respect, affirm and are comfortable with all sexual choices and lifestyles.” The Toronto curriculum, like so many produced by the sex ed industry, is based on a specific agenda. By centering on political correctness, it completely ignores truths of current science, as well as biological, cultural and individual differences between people. “There is a significant flaw with this approach: it’s not based on reality,” says Grossman.

Basically, children are left to decide what’s best for them in terms of how, when, dos and don’ts of sex. Really? Are children that well-informed and mature to know what’s best for them? Grade 6 students, for example, are instructed to consider their comfort level, personal and family values, and the limits and comfort of others when making any decision regarding a relationship. Grossman questions how a 6-grader could possibly know any of that when even adults struggle with those things.

For Grade 7 students, this is what the curriculum delivers: “Be clear in your own mind about what you are comfortable or uncomfortable with. Being able to talk about this with a partner is an important part of sexual health. Having sex can be an enjoyable experience and can be an important part of a close relationship when you are older.” Grossman questions how a Grade-7 student can possibly know what when you are older means.

They may think that at Grade 8 they will be older. The curriculum is vague and leaves the immature child to decide when they are ready, after discussing it with their equally immature partner. That doesn’t make any sense. Then, at Grade 8, students are taught that there are many options available for sex. Again, it’s up to the child to decide about their choices instead of giving the teacher authority to clarify important things.

The teen brain is different

Teens act on impulse and emotions because their brains are not fully developed: the portion that plays a critical role in decision-making, problem-solving and understanding the consequences of actions won’t be fully mature until the person is into their 20s. This neuroscience needs to be brought into sex education so teachers and parents, and also teenagers and children, understand it and know not to even get close to a situation that they will later regret.

This information doesn’t get into sex education, though, because it doesn’t jive with the ideology that people are all the same, sexual beings from cradle to grave that should act on their sexual urges at any time. The curriculum then ignores current knowledge about child and adolescent development, sexually transmitted diseases, neuropsychology and many other areas, since current science undermines that ideology.

Students are offered a menu with various forms of sexual expression, presented in the curriculum as if all forms are the same and pose the same risks. The curriculum omits that young girls, having an immature cervix, are much more prone to vaginal infections than adult women; that condoms do not offer total protection against infections and sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS; and that anal sex presents much higher risks of contracting STDs—in the case of HIV, from a very conservative estimate, the risk is at least 31% higher in anal sex than in vaginal intercourse, according to the Health Department of New York City.

Grossman does not advice anal sex to young kids: “It’s too dangerous. Don’t do it.” She mentions a student who got HIV the first time she had anal sex—it can happen. Until 2014, the FDA website used to have a warning for anal sex: “Condoms provide some protection but anal intercourse is simply too dangerous to practice.—C. Everett Koop, General Surgeon.“ Now the warning has been removed. Did biology change? asks Grossman. No. What changed is the culture and the pressure to push for the sex ed agenda. As a result, this information becomes unavailable to the people who need it the most, such as young gay men.

In addition, the curriculum fails to mention that women are much more vulnerable to STDs than men. The Centers for Disease Control in the US informs that “Sexually transmitted diseases pose severe threats to women’s health and fertility … biological factors place women at greater risk than men.” Grossman adds: “The ignorance and lack of biological correct information due to the sex ed industry has lead the US to a situation in which a young person between the ages of 13 and 24 gets an STD every 3.5 seconds.” In Canada, STD rates are also going up.

“This is a crusade to change society, to desensitize children and indoctrinate them,” concludes Grossman in her lecture. What Grossman says is crucial, as it relates to many preventable health problems that are not properly addressed in the curricula and may be a matter of life or death. Not to mention psychological immaturity for sex, which can cause confusion and depression.

One last thing you should know: one of the creators of the curriculum in question, former deputy education minister Benjamin Levin, is in jail for sexual crimes against children, including the possession and distribution of child pornography of the worst kind. You can read the details in TheToronto Life.

8-year olds learn lesson 1: “Let’s have sex”

If you want to check out the controversy about the sex ed curriculum in American schools, here’s a video. At 36:00, its final segment brings a creepy presentation by the US National Sexuality Administration. Using a puppet, it teaches 8-year olds about gender identity, abortion, birth control and sexual intercourse (“It’s when a penis is inserted into a vagina, a mouth or an anus”). This is Lesson 1, entitled “Let’s have sex.” Please note that this is not a title: it’s a command.

What I also perceive in this scenario is that encouraging girls to have sex prematurely means throwing them unguarded into a culture that treats sexually active boys like studs and sexually active girls like sluts. I can’t stress enough how the double standards are still prevalent in our society, especially among teenagers too young to know better. The occurrence of bullying against fragile girls and their resulting stigmatization is a serious issue. Some of them get so depressed they commit suicide.

The defenders of the sex ed curricula argue it’s necessary for children’s safety. Is it really? Dr. Grossman destroys this argument with a very simple instruction: explain to kids that they have private parts, those covered by their bathing suit, and if an adult tries to see or touch them, kids should run, scream and tell their parents. That’s it. No need to be dwelling in anatomically correct names and anal sex.

The same approach is adopted by Lynnette Smith, a sex educator interviewed in the 2014 BBC documentary Porn: What’s the Harm? In her case, she teaches children about pornography. It has nothing to do with what’s proposed by the sex ed curricula, yet she also teaches 5-year olds. Another difference is that she talks to parents first, whereas the sex ed curricula is applied without parents being informed when. You can see Smith’s educational approach at 50:00 into Porn: What’s the Harm? The way she talks to the children is really inspiring.

I would add some questions to the mix. How about regulating the media so it will stop bombarding children with sexual content and encouraging precocious sexuality? How about regulating the multibillion-dollar porn industry so it stops distributing material that glorifies violence, misogyny and pedophilia? How about finding effective ways of stopping revenge porn and the rape culture in universities? Amid all the hypersexualization that occurs, children are being robbed of their childhood and pre-teens have to carry an extra emotional burden for being exposed to sex when they are not ready.

The sex ed curricula not only fails to educate children about porn, but it also fails to prepare young girls for the potential hazards of an active sexual life in a world of double moral standards. Boys have their masculinity defined by how many girls they can score as opposed to cultivating sexual integrity. Girls are conditioned to dress and act like sluts in order to fit in, but they aren’t supposed to be sluts. Slut is a stereotype, though. If something dresses and acts like a slut, then it must be a slut. It’s a conundrum. Sociologist Gail Dines explains that, when a girl is labeled a slut, she experiences the same trauma symptoms as a rape victim because that’s the equivalent of raping her own identity.

Say a girl likes a guy and he asks for an intimate picture of her. She obliges because nudity is everywhere as a norm, and she thinks that’s expected from her in order to please the boy. The photo leaks on the internet, as the boy wants/needs to brag his conquest, or maybe he’s a resentful ex-boyfriend. The girl then will be called a slut and will be bullied relentlessly. She’s a victim. In countries like England and the United States, however, to add insult to injury, the law will label her as a sex offender for sending out “child pornography.” Now how hideous and hypocritical is that?

That’s how institutions go. A poor girl victimized by a leaked photo is victimized again by the legal system while it is OK for the porn industry to distribute videos suggesting incest with pre-teens that any child can access. It’s the typical situation where petty infractions are punished (not in this case, though, since the girl is innocent) and huge crimes committed by big fish are not addressed because big fish have money.

Sexual education should not be left in the hands of institutions, as every institution has an agenda. Parents know what’s best for their children. Each child is different, and what those curricula do is treat children as if they were all the same, ignoring the specific background, personal stage of development and needs of each child.

On my next post I want to take a look at the hookup culture. Yeah, party, alcohol and sex, right? There’s interesting stuff ahead, stay tuned!

How do pornographic images shape gender and sexual identity? Sociologist and author Gail Dines answers this question in her TED Talk “Growing Up in a Pornified Culture.”

Today people live in an image-based society and no longer in a print-based society like some decades ago. In an article published in Details magazine, entitled “How Internet porn is changing teen sex,” pornographer Joanna Angel says: “The girls these days just seem to come to the set porn-ready.” In other words, the culture is socializing young girls to be ready for pornography whether they ever end up in a porn site or not. They have been taught to hypersexualize and pornify themselves.

When you look at the hypersexualized images surrounding us, from ads to magazine covers and music videos, they all come down to the image of a sexy, good-looking young woman. Since every image has a viewer in mind, who is the target here and what message is this kind of image sending out? The answer is simple. It targets men, and the message is: fuck me.

So, before a male growing up in this culture can even speak, he’s surrounded by images of females offering themselves to him. As for young girls, when they are developing their sexual identity, they learn they have two choices: they’re either fuckable or invisible. A girl then will most likely go for fuckable in order to fit in and feel appreciated.

The second factor in the culture that plays a big role for boys, of course, is porn itself. As society moved from print porn to online porn, everything changed. Here’s another quote from Details magazine: “There is an entire generation of young people who think sex ends with a money shot to the face.” In case you don’t know, money shot is ejaculation on the face—and just for the record, it can give the woman sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea in the eye.

The Internet made pornography accessible, affordable and anonymous, the 3 As that drive demand. According to TheHuffington Post, in 2013 porn sites were already getting more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry backed up by other industries such as hospitality, IT and credit card services. Corporations traditionally not associated with porn are behind its distribution.

A study analyzing 300 porn scenes showed that 90% of the top watched scenes contained at least one aggressive act of physical and/or verbal abuse against the woman. Dines typed the word porn into a search engine to see what would come up for a boy seeking porn for the first time. Here’s what she found in a few seconds, with free access to anyone: “The major act on virtually all websites is gagging,” Dines explains. “This is when the men puts the penis so far down her throat that she gags almost to the point of vomiting. They put a lot of mascara on her face so that she’s actually tearing and you can see the rivulets of mascara running down. As she’s chocking, he grabs her hair, pulls her towards him and says, ‘Look at me.’ This is a kind of sexual psychopath. When you think that porn is a major form of sex ed, think about what’s gonna happen to the next generation of boys, most of whom are brought up on hardcore mainstream Internet porn.”

Meatholes

A 12-year old boy that seeks porn on the Internet for the first time is certainly not thinking about gagging. But the text that goes along with the images teaches him this is what he enjoys if he wants to be a man. Here’s what a popular site advocates: “Do you know what we say to things like romance and foreplay? We say fuck off. We take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would REALLY like to do. We gag them til their makeup starts running … And then we give them the sticky bath.”

The next constant scene the boy is going to see is violent pounding anal sex. The promotional copy for the video Annally Ripped Whores, for example, goes like this: “We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want. Chicks being ass-fucked till their sphincters are pink, puffy and totally blown out. Adult diapers just might be in store for these whores when their work is done.” This is the violence present in regular mainstream porn, as Gail Dines points out. An introduction to sex that is disturbing and traumatizing to young boys.

A standard scene is one woman and three men performing oral, vaginal and anal penetration, pulling her hair, squeezing her neck, spitting on her face and calling her names. Women are dehumanized and become bitches, whores, sluts: insatiable objects with a set of holes whose only purpose is to pleasure males, and which men are entitled to use and abuse at will. Porn literally refers to women as “meatholes.” When men no longer see women as human beings just like themselves, all empathy is gone.

This is the sex education today across the world. Dines quotes decades of research showing that the younger boys get to porn, the more it limits their capacity for intimacy, the more it decreases their empathy for rape victims, the more it fuels depression and anxiety, and more likely they are to engage in distorted sexual behavior. Those boys will become our doctors, judges and teachers one day. Think about that.

It’s already happening in fact. In her TED Talk about rape culture, Brynne Thomas exposes what goes on in campuses. Both male and female students already reflect a rape culture in their daily language. For example, rape has become a synonym for something difficult, so they say they were ”raped” by a tough exam. And there’s more. Students at Miami University published a collection of jokes entitled How to Get Away with Rape. A chant in Yale included “No means yes, and yes means anal.“ And at Saint Mary’s, this is the chant sang by a large group of students to welcome hundreds of newcomers: “Y is for your sister, O is for oh-so-tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent…”

Don’t try this at home

We have a whole generation of boys desensitized. They need more stimulation to get aroused. Torture, rape, and sex with minors are common themes used for that end. Porn director Jules Jordan, one of the most hardcore in the world, says: “So many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff that I’m always trying to figure out ways to do something differently.” Pornographer Mitchell Spinelli explains that “People want more. They want to know how many dicks you can shove up an ass. It’s like Fear Factor meets Jackass. Make it more hard, make it more nasty, make it more relentless.”

Now mind you: when porn portrays violence against women, rape and pedophilia, it doesn’t matter if it’s just a “performance.” It’s still selling the notion that those acts are not only okay but exciting, pleasurable and desirable. That doesn’t mean all men are going to torture, rape and become pedophiles because they watch porn; but they get used to the idea and start to regard it as normal.

It’s not such a large stretch from thinking something is normal to acting upon it.

The brains of pornography consumers are being wired to associate sexual pleasure with causing pain to a woman. This association gets deeply ingrained in the brain because users are actively interacting with porn through masturbation and orgasm. Here’s AC Cream’s comment in an adult DVD forum with recommendations of titles centered in “painful ass fuckin”: “The most painful scene I’ve ever seen is Gang-Bang Auditions #3 from Diabolic. The scene with Aspen Brock … The guys start asking her questions like ‘You like that dick in you ass?’, but she is in such pain her answers are hard to understand. She tried to say something like ‘I looooove iiiit’, but then the tears started flowing … A porn chick not handling dick gave me major Bone-age.” In another thread, user mehlub92 says, “I am looking for clips or movies in which the pornstar in real breaks down and starts to cry, e.g. Taylor Rain in meatholes.”

This short video brings us clips of interviews with male users. They say they learn about sex through porn, they want to try out with their girlfriends the acts they see and may even force themselves on the girls. Some think porn teaches them what turns on a woman.

Let’s see what pornstar Kelly Shibari has to say about that: “If you tried porn sex at home, nobody would have an orgasm. The point of porn sex—well, most porn sex—is showing repetitive penetration in positions that never actually touch sexually pleasurable spots.”

Journalist and male sex educator Michael Castleman explains porn actresses moan in the throes of supposed passion but rarely have orgasms. “Porn is male fantasy. It has no interest in women’s sexual satisfaction. With its rushed, mechanical, nonsensual sex, it’s a rare woman who could come. No wonder so many men are in the dark about women’s orgasms and erotic satisfaction.”

On my next post, I’ll show what happens when a group of die-hard porn fans visit a real set to watch live action featuring a trio of female performers. You don’t want to miss that! Let’s find out what turns these girls on.

What happens to a generation that has porn at their fingertips through computers and smartphones?

Just by typing the word porn into a search engine, they get 436 million results in a matter of seconds. In the 2014 BBC show Porn: What’s the Harm? presenter Jameela Jamil leads us through the biggest survey ever conducted on pornography use in the UK, with over a thousand teenagers from the ages 16 to 21 anonymously answering questions such as: How old were you when you first watched porn? How often do you watch it now? How do you think it affects what men and women expect from sex?

The answers were analyzed by leading experts in pornography Dr. Miranda Horvart and Dr. Maddy Coy. The average age for boys to watch porn for the first time is 10. Of all teenagers surveyed, only 22% saw porn for the first time on purpose; the rest was shown porn by someone else. And amid the bombarding of pornographic images in their daily lives, 24% of the teenagers said they encountered pornographic material at least once a week when they were looking for something else. Most men and women used it for sexual stimulation and masturbation.

From the entire group, 10% responded they thought that while men watch porn for sexual gratification, women watch it to learn about sex. I myself—judging by what I found in my own research—think many males also use porn to learn about sex. I remember a few mentioning they would watch girl-girl porn to that end, and they also believed porn sex was what girls liked.

In general, 30% of the boys deliberately looked for porn against 12% of the girls, and 50% of the boys looked for porn from once a day to once a week, whereas 50% of the girls never looked for porn online. Out of a thousand teenagers, 229 persons said there was nothing good about porn—75% of those were females.

How porn affects sexual expectations

Former pornstar Gemma Massey tells Jamila many girls in the industry take drugs to endure the sex scenes, and they only do such scenes because they need the money. I also heard that from countless ex-porn stars. And, like all of them, Gemma says: “Porn sex is not real. It’s not how I would have sex at home at all.” She adds that doing porn all the time mentally messes up with the person. I will discuss that in a future post.

When asked “Do you think porn affects what young people expect from sex?” 75% of the survey group said yes to males’ expectations, and 53% said yes to females’ expectations. One out of 3 top responses was that boys expected girls’ bodies to be like those of pornstars, with no pubic hair and large breasts. I would add that porn also taught boys their own penises need to be huge and deliver long, sustained erections—which naturally causes great anxiety to them. As for girls, porn has led a large number of young women to seek cosmetic surgery for vaginal lip reduction: girls as young as 12 are considering this kind of surgery.

This goes to show how porn imposes limited views of women’s bodies. A group of boys and girls participating in the survey were shown a panel with 57 molds taken from real women’s vulvas, which naturally varied in shape and size. Both boys and girls were surprised to learn those vulvas were normal: all of them thought the vulvas were abnormal or ugly. As for me, I was saddened by the fact that girls today can’t accept the very symbol of their womanhood. It’s not enough that they need to compete with photoshoped models 25% thinner than a regular woman (in old times, the rate would be only 8%), now they also learn to reject their genitals. Gynecologist Gail Busby, who conducted the experiment, discourages young girls to do the surgery: “They don’t need surgery because there’s nothing wrong with them.”

The most common answer to how porn affected teenagers’ expectations about sex was that young men expected women to behave like sex objects, and young women expected to be treated like sex objects. A 17-year old boy responded: “Guys will expect the chance for rougher sex, or for a girl to be very flexible and so on.” A 16-year old girl said: “Boys think all girls will behave like girls in porn and that a lot of quite extreme stuff is normal to do.”

In addition, the behavior of girls sexting their naked pictures has become a natural progression in a hypersexualized society that regards females as sex objects, and in which females regard themselves as sexual objects. Here, we go back to my post about the hypersexualization of children: girls send those pictures because they believe it’s what’s expected from them in order to fit in and avoid rejection.

When those sexy images leak— and they often do—it doesn’t end well. Sometimes it can even lead to suicide, like in the case of 18-year old Jessica Logan and 13-year old Hope Witsell. The lives of girls are ruined when those pictures are shared and become viral, and there are cases in which such images are downloaded and transferred to child pornography sites (on those sites, according to the UK Internet Watch Foundation, there are photos of victims as young as 3 to 6 years old, which were taken by older children). When images leak, female victims face social isolation and bullying. As much as modern society likes to deem itself progressive, double standards are stronger than ever when it comes to sexuality.

There’s more to porn

If there are clear consequences for young people when it comes to sexting and posting sexual images, the effects of childhood exposure to porn are harder to gage. In 2014, a 12-year old boy raped his 7-year old sister after watching hardcore porn online: he said he watched it with friends and gained a desire to try it out. Sociologist Gail Dines, author of the book Pornland: How Porn Hijacked Our Sexuality, interviewed a man incarcerated for child molestation: he told Dines he wasn’t a pedophile and just wanted to try something different. His is not an isolated case. For the first time, men who aren’t inherently pedophiles are initiating sex with children.

In the BBC program, Jamil interviewed a girl in her early twenties who was raped by someone she thought of as a friend. When she went to his blog afterwards, she found out it included porn images that were very similar to what had happened to her. She adds: “For certain people who do that, rape is so ingrained in their minds that for them it’s okay.”

Lynnette Smith, a sex educator working with teenagers on a daily basis for the past 20 years, is concerned about what she’s been hearing from teenage boys. In several schools, quite often, they ask her: “If I’m being intimate or trying it on with a girl and she doesn’t like it, if I keep going and keep going, she will finally like it, won’t she?” Invariably, Smith ends up tracking the boys’ question back to porn they had watched.

There you go.

So far I’ve covered what porn does physically and mentally to boys and what stems from the interaction of boys and girls with pornographic images. On my next post, I’ll focus on females and porn.

In the meantime, you can watch Porn: What’s the Harm? for additional information and also to learn more about what the surveyed teenagers said. It’s a fascinating program.

What about you? What’s your take on porn, and how do you think it affects your own behavior or the behavior of those around you?

Can porn physically change the structure of your brain and even shrink it?

Hold on. We’ll get to that in a while.

With the wide spread use of high-speed Internet porn, we are in the middle of the fastest moving unconscious experiment ever conducted on a global level: nearly every young guy with Internet access becomes an eager test subject. That’s the conclusion of several experts, including physiology teacher Gary Wilson, who presented a TED Talk on the subject.

It all starts with a 10-year old boy—that’s the age when, according to research, boys usually seek pornography for the first time. High-speed Internet offers him not only nudity but constant novelty at a click of the mouse.

Our boy gets hooked.

The primal portion of his brain, focused on basic survival and reproduction, sees every new female on-screen as an opportunity for matting. It then releases dopamine, which keeps the boy clicking and clicking for more gratification—pretty much like a rat in a lab. A heavy porn user’s brain begins associating sex with behaviors such as being alone, voyeurism, clicking and searching, multiple tabs, constant novelty, shock and surprise.

Real sex, in contrast, is courtship, touching and being touched, smells, pheromones, emotional connection and interaction with a person. So what happens when this porn user finds a real mate?

He realizes he’s in trouble.

The increase of dopamine production promotes a cycle of binging and craving that numbs the brain to pleasures of everyday life while making it hyper-reactive to porn. Finally, the user’s willpower erodes, his brain changes and porn addiction settles. Symptoms include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, social anxiety, depression, performance anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Erectile dysfunction

It’s hard to believe that something healthy as sex can be harmful, but as Wilson notes, “Internet porn is not sex: it’s as different from real sex as today’s videogames are from checkers. From all activities on the Internet, porn is the most addictive.”

According to sexual addiction expert Dr. Victor Cline, repeated exposure to porn accompanied by masturbation triggers the first phase of the addiction. The second phase is escalation, requiring more porn exposure to achieve the same buzz and sometimes leading to a preference for porn over sexual intercourse. The third phase is desensitization, when the user views as normal what was once considered repulsive or immoral.

Finally, in the acting-out phase, the addict runs an increased risk of making the leap from screen to real life. This behavior may manifest itself in the form of promiscuity, cheating a partner, voyeurism, exhibitionism, group sex, rape, sadomasochism, or even child molestation.

Another serious problem with porn addiction is erectile dysfunction—which no blue pill can cure. A survey shows that Internet porn is killing young men’s performance: tuned into the porn hypergratification that’s provided by constant novelty, shock and surprise, the men’s brains are sending weaker signals to their genitals during real-life sex. The libido drops to the point that an erection becomes impossible, even while watching porn.

Like in a classical case of addiction, there is an increasing desensitization of the brain. It will then try to compensate that by seeking more novelty, shock and surprise, until it’s overstimulated to the limit and can no longer respond. The teenage brain is extremely vulnerable to addiction because its reward system is fully developed, whereas its restriction system is not: a teenage brain is all accelerator and no brakes.

Until a few years ago, there was no way of studying the impact of porn in human behavior because it was impossible to form a control group of non-users. That spoke volumes about the pervasiveness of pornography among men. When porn addicts began to seek help and break their habit, they became the control group that was missing.

From pigs to dogs to fish

Journalist Martin Daubney investigates the effects of porn in young users in the 2013 documentary Porn on the Brain. He used to be the editor of porn magazine Loaded and, after a long period away from pornography, he goes online and searches for the keyword porn. The results pop up in seconds. He’s shocked: “The first thing I see is two gaping orifices … It’s actually an Asian girl’s posterior, called Asian Slut Double Dipped.” He then finds a woman being fisted by one man while another pisses on her face. Next, a staged incest depicts the fisting of a teenager by her dad.

“I don’t remember being exposed to anything like this ever in my life,” says Daubney. “Porn has become altogether macabre. Where is the enjoyment and innocence gone? Now it’s all about a world of male domination and female humiliation.” A group of high school students tells him porn content pops up all the time on their Facebook or in advertisements, including illegal material—there’s everything “from pigs to dogs to fish.”

Daubney persuades neuroscientist Dr. Valeri Voon, from the University of Cambridge, to perform a brain scan in a group of porn addicts while they watch pornographic images. Unsure of what to expect, she is surprised with the results: users’ brains reacted just like the brains of substance addicts, with a pronounced increase in activity in the reward center.

A perfect example of the effects of porn addiction is provided by Calum, a good-looking 19-year old student who watches porn at least 15 times a day. He volunteers to talk on camera and picks up Daubney to show him around while they chat. As Calum is driving, he sees a girl on the street that triggers his compulsion. He’s forced to rush to a public restroom and, afterwards, looks miserable. He has no control over his porn addiction.

In the past Calum tried to cut off his habit, but porn images still invaded his fantasies. When Calum describes his real-life sex experiences, it’s obvious he’s been heavily conditioned by porn to regard women as sexual objects existing solely to please him, as he mentions twice that his preferences in bed depend on “what the girl has to offer.” His great concern regarding his addiction is that he’s not getting the most of sex as a result. That alone goes to show he seems to have lost the ability to connect with a partner: he has sex with body parts. “If a girl has a nice ass it has to be anal. If she has nice breasts it has to be missionary.” To Calum, real sex is not as good as porn. Luckily he didn’t become a sex offender.

Dr. John Woods, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, has treated dozens of young sex offenders. In the early 2000s there were very few cases of online porn involved in an offender’s behavior. “Now they’re the majority. There is no direct proof that watching violent porn instigates violent acts towards women,” he explains, “but clinically it’s clear that there is a connection.” Woods mentions the case of a patient who watched extreme porn and, haunted by those images, eventually raped a child.

Finally an erection

In the 2008 documentary Porndemic: Sex in the Digital Age by Robin Benger, addiction therapist Dr. Doris Vincent states that until 2002 she had never treated sex addicts. Six years later, she had more than 200 patients suffering from porn addiction, all male. “Internet porn is the crack and cocaine of sex addiction. It affects your dopamine reward system quite strongly. You’re playing around with very dangerous chemicals in your brain.”

Two physical changes occur in the brains of porn users, as shown in a study conducted in Germany in 2014. The first change is a rewiring of the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that restricts overindulging behavior. The second and more stunning neurological discovery is that high-speed Internet porn may actually shrink the brain: the more a person watches porn, the more accentuated the shrinkage. That means less grey matter in the portion of the brain responsible for decision making and motivation.

The good news is the addiction symptoms are reversed when the user quits watching porn, and after a few months of abstinence the changes are astounding. Interestingly enough, middle-age men recover faster than teenagers because their brains had not been impacted by Internet porn until later in their lives. Former users report the ability to have an erection, more self-confidence, focus and proactivity.

Men willing to quit porn now join an expanding movement across the Internet, with thousands of new adepts on sites like NoFap and Reboot Nation. And the numbers keep rising. Reboot Nation’s founder Gabe Deen tells his story in the 2015 news special Is free pornography destroying our brains?He began watching porn on a regular basis when he was eight. At one point Deen couldn’t lead a normal life without porn. He developed erectile dysfunction at the age of 23.

“It started out with very soft porn, then it would escalate to a couple of guys and one girl, gang bangs … and then I would watch things that were shocking or created anxiety, like very abusive and misogynistic stuff.” Neurosurgeon Donald Hilton, interviewed in the program, explains that, since the human brain naturally seeks novelty, there’s a progression in the use of porn that may translate into violence and pedophilia: “We need new. Then new is aggression. New is younger.”

Neuroscience studies still need to be expanded for a definitive conclusion about how porn affects the brain, but it certainly facilitates the desensitization to violence and shapes behavior.

Not only porn addicts are affected by pornography, though. Boys and girls, men and women that aren’t addicted can also be dramatically impacted by porn. I’ll be exploring that on my next post.

How many penises and sexual positions can be sneaked into children cartoons and TV shows?

More importantly: what does that have to do with you?

A lot, actually.

No matter if you’re a child, a teen, a young adult or a parent: this has affected and is still affecting you right now, directly or indirectly.

We are all bombarded with sexual content by the media to such extent that we lose track of the true meaning of what we see. We have become desensitized and regard certain things as normal when in reality they aren’t normal at all. We need to look at them with fresh eyes. We need to see things for what they are.

I never gave much thought to that until I stumbled across SubliminalHyper Sexualization of Children Exposed on Youtube. It parades a collection of sexual imagery in entertainment and products aimed at children. I gasped as I watched the full menu, from genitals to oral and anal sex, not to mention plain pedophilia. In fact, I was so appalled that I did a research and found countless other instances all over the place.

What the heck is going on?

Boys and girls are exposed to sex from a very tender age. They suffer a sexual assault from ads, toys, games, films, music, TV and fashion. Sexual content is used not only to sell but ultimately to condition behavior that will affect future romantic relationships and sexuality. According to the Geena Davis Institute of Gender in the Media, recent research shows that girls as early as 6 years old view themselves as sexual objects: they feel they need to be sexy in order to be appreciated.

Not dolls: plastic prostitutes for girls to role play with

Dolls, for example, are hypersexualized, and so are female cartoon characters. Girls are sold the notion that being sexy is more important than developing qualities such as self-acceptance, independence and individuality. As a result, girls are indoctrinated to value sex appeal, materialism and conformism—as objects they become inherently passive, since objects are passive by definition.

Smartphones, tablets and TV fill the lives of children all day long. Many spend more time interacting with media than they do with anything else. The three largest media conglomerates are Disney, NBC and CBS, and most children shows on those networks promote the sexualization of young children through their programming.

Programming means conditioning: it can change you without you realizing. You start to act upon beliefs and patterns of behavior that are not your own but rather forced upon you in a deceptive way and through repetition.

Hypersexualized exposes a load of sexual images in children shows that are hidden in plain view or flash on the screen before your conscious mind can filter them. Those images go straight to your subconscious mind, which stores the information and uses it to program your behavior. I was shocked with what I saw in the seemingly innocent images gathered in the video.

Is this appropriate for children?

How about shows heavily geared towards kids kissing, dating and cheating? Let’s remember that whatever children see shapes their view of the world and teaches them their role in society: children imitate behaviors to which they are exposed. You have young girls that are children idols and grow up to become young celebrities in the music industry. Then they are pressured to hypersexualize themselves, as Miley Cyrus explains to Barbara Walters in an interview: “I don’t always want to be naked. Once I came out on stage completely covered, and they rolled ‘Miley is boring, she doesn’t get naked and she’s boring.’ No matter what I do, I’m either boring or I’m a slut.” Young adults such as Cyrus are role models to their teen fans, who want to be like them. That reinforces the slut culture and opens up a whole market for the fashion industry.

How about a T-shirt that reads “I love cock”? Girls as young as seven-year olds are wearing it.

Sociologist Dr. Gail Dines says there used to be two main categories of porn: the implicit soft porn and the explicit hardcore porn. Today, porn is categorized as hardcore mainstream or hardcore extreme, while soft porn has moved to popular culture. If you watch videos by artists such as Lady Gaga, Rhiana, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears and others, you get the full soft porn deal: nudity, twerking, orgies and quite often sexual lyrics. In fact, even hardcore porn can be found in pop culture these days: the music video All Over the House by Skepta features porn actors, genitals and real penetration right on your face.

Remember that children and young teens copy what they see and hear.

Children pageants like Toddlers and Tiaras are another example of how pervasive this hypersexualization is. In a spoof starring Tom Hanks, he takes his daughter to the Ultimate Sexy Baby Pageant. For starters, the words sexy and baby shouldn’t even be in the same sentence. Tom Hanks alleged 6-year old daughter performs with heavy makeup and a dress that exposes her midriff. In the end, she sings the line “Talk dirty to me” in a flirtatious way and Tom Hanks applauds, repeating several times what a sexy baby she is.

Is it me, or this is plain creepy? Yet people are so conditioned to find it normal they don’t realize how twisted this is. They think it’s cute and hilarious.

The message is clear to girls: you’re expected to be sexy at all costs in order to earn appreciation. That also means being morbidly thin like the photoshopped models seen in ads everywhere.

Educational psychologist Lori Day writes in the Huffington Post that the widespread practice of misrepresenting the appearance of models in order to sell products and services creates false and unrealistic expectations about what people should, can, and do look like. “Advertisers don’t even have the tip of a fig leaf over themselves on this issue. This is deceptive and damaging to our daughters—and to our sons, who are also influenced to believe girls can and should look like these advertisements, and who are starting to see male models photoshopped to unrealistic muscular proportions as well.”

Many studies provide crucial data connecting these ads to negative outcomes for girls. Here are just a few:

Then we have this desperate need for social validation not only leading to health problems and low self-esteem but also promiscuity. Moreover, this kind of objectification promotes a culture of rape and pedophilia. What do you think happens when you have young girls trained to be sexual objects, and boys and men trained to view them as such? Objects are meant to be available for grabs. Objects are meant to be used and abused since they lack humanity—they’re just “things.”

Here’s some food for thought. How does this female objectification affect romantic relationships? Does it contribute to a closer and more satisfying bond for men and women? Does it promote equality and respect, which constitute the foundation for a healthy relationship and, ultimately, a well-adjusted society?

Before I end this post, let me be clear: I’m not a moralist by any stretch of the imagination. But the same way I don’t like the church preaching chastity, I don’t like the media preaching porn and objectification, and thus rendering sex utterly banal. Sex is not banal—especially for females, because it implies opening up their bodies to someone else. Of course sex can be casual, but it needs to be rooted in self-respect and true desire, not merely triggered by social pressure and indoctrination. Having sex is not as simple as having a glass of water—it does have consequences, both physical and emotional.

Sex needs to have meaning. Sex devoid of meaning is dirty in the worst possible sense.

We are all bombarded with sexual content by the mass media to such an extent that we lose track of the true meaning of what we see. We have become desensitized and regard certain things as normal when in reality they aren’t normal at all. We need to look at them with fresh eyes. We need to see things for what they are.

Want to make a difference? Sign the Truth in Ads petition to ban those hideous photoshopped ads that lead our girls to such a miserable condition.

On my next post I’ll be talking about the greatest porn experiment ever made. Stay tuned. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.